Jonathan Kehayias (@SQLPoolBoy) of SQLskills.com evaluates the performance impact of query_post_execution_showplan and explains why you need to be very careful about using it in a production environment.

In an effort to encourage you to keep your SQL Server 2012 instances up to date, I wanted to highlight a slew of performance-related fixes that are mostly available only through Service Pack 1 or various Cumulative Update packages.

I wanted to talk about two new features in SQL Sentry Plan Explorer: Plan obfuscation, where you can hide sensitive information in your plans before sharing them, and custom layouts, a way to take complete control over the visual representation of your graphical plans.

Getting help with execution plans outside of your company can be a challenge, since you may not be willing to share information such as server names, database names, object names, schema, column names, index structure, and so on. Read on to see how you can protect your execution plans with a free PowerShell script from Jonathan Kehayias of SQLskills.